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What can cybernetics, the science of communications and automatic control systems in machines and living things, teach us about the ways we shape and are shaped by sex?

By delving into topics like sexual reproduction and the ways sex become gender, we will explore how social regulatory systems in technological platforms that produce social pressure and govern behavior. Through discussing examples from art, contemporary media, and hands on exercises, we will tease out social patterns and norms that emerge over time, through bodies, to form culture.

Price: Free with suggested donation.

Materials: None.

Audience: Open to all.

Melanie Hoff is an artist and educator examining the role technology plays in social organization and reinforcing hegemonic structures. Hoff studies how platforms and processes — including algorithms, data collection, social media, networks, simulation, and ritual — yield distinct modes of seeing, thinking, and feeling, structure social organization, and reinforce existing systems of power. They write software, lead experimental workshops, teach Critical Interaction Design at Rutgers University, are an organizer and teacher at the School for Poetic Computation, is a founding member of the Cybernetics Library, and Summer 2019 Tech Resident at Pioneer Works.

About the Series
This Cybernetics of Sex is a part of the Heart of the Machine program series responding to Refiguring Binaries curated by Kelani Nichole.